away to meet Jesus."
"I don't think Daddy—" Vance began, but Julia squeezed his shoulder sharply, casting a significant look at his younger sister, and the boy subsided.
Lula Braswell came up to them and hugged Julia affectionately. "Why don't I take the children on over to our place? You could have some time here to yourself, then you all could eat dinner with us. How about it, Bonnie? Would you like some of my gingerbread cookies? Vance?"
"Yes, ma'am," Vance answered, casting an uncertain look at his mother.
"Thank you." Julia smiled at the older woman. "But you've done too much for us already. I don't know what I'd have done without you." Mrs. Braswell had been more than kind. She had helped Julia lay Will out, and her two sons had built the casket. Julia couldn't have afforded to buy a coffin. Just paying for the pine slats for the box and giving the minister a stipend for the service had taken almost all of the money she had saved.
"It's no more than what you'd have done for me. Than what you have done for me." The Braswells' youngest girl had come down with a terrible fever the year before, and Mrs. Braswell herself had been so sick she hadn't been able to care for her, so Julia had nursed both of them until Lula was back on her feet. Mrs. Braswell had been Julia's fast friend since then, despite Will's obvious disapproval.
Julia smiled. "Thank you. I would appreciate it."
Lula led the children to her wagon while the Braswell boys lowered the coffin into the ground and shoveled the dirt back in on top of it. They patted the black earth down into a mound, and Lee, the youngest, stuck a crude wooden cross into the ground and held it while the other boy hammered it in with the back of the shovel. They shouldered their tools and tipped their hats to Julia.
"Sorry, ma'am."
"Sorry, Mrs. Dobson "
"Thank you."
They joined their mother and Julia's children in the wagon and drove off. The preacher took Julia's hand and offered his final condolences before he, too, left. Julia turned back to the fresh grave. She was alone. She stared down at the mounded grave. Now was when she should make her peace with Will. Now was when she should cry.
No tears came. Julia leaned over and placed half of the handful of wildflowers she had gathered at the base of Will's marker. She turned to the grave beside his. It was short, only half the length of Will's, and the earth had settled so much it was flat. It had, after all, been almost nine years. It, too, bore a simple cross of two small lengths of wood hammered together, so weatherbeaten that the words scratched into it were almost unreadable now: Pamela Dobson, b. January 3, 1895, d. Nov. 8, 1896.
Weeds had sprung up on it, as they did every year. Julia yanked up each shoot and tossed it away. She knelt beside the marker and laid down the rest of the wildflowers. She took off her gloves and slid her hand over the ground in a kind of caress, as though it were the baby she touched.
"Pammy." She had been Jimmy's daughter, the child for whom Julia had married Will Dobson, and Julia had loved her to distraction. She had looked like Jimmy, with his thick, dark hair and chocolate brown eyes, and she had had a smile like sunshine. A thousand times over the past nine years, Julia had longed to sec that smile again.
But she had died of scarlet fever when she was less than two years old. Only the fact that Julia had just had Vance, who depended on her utterly, had kept her going after Pamela's death.
Julia touched the rough cross. She wished she had the money for a granite marker. Before many more years passed, no one would know that a sweet child lay here beside the man who was not her father but the man who had given her his name.
The tears that would not come for her newly dead husband gathered now in Julia's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She had lived with Will for almost eleven years, cooked his meals, nursed him through sickness, borne his children because it was her duty,